Pure Beauty

The first rapper on Jack White’s label, known mostly for the publicity stunts in his past, loves conceptual art, ’90s hip-hop, and grand statements

SHIRT is living in the shadow of a publicity stunt. Back in 2014, the New York City spitter mocked up a fake New York Times website including a purported article that lauded his music in grandiloquent terms. The ruse spread across the Internet, but ultimately backfired. He became a poster boy for the struggle rapper movement—that is, up-and-coming MCs so desperate for attention that they’ll attempt any gimmick to secure column inches and blog mentions.

Self-inflicted though it was, this labelling was unfair to SHIRT. He’s a bright writer who’s blessed with a husky voice, and he relays his robust flow in commanding and ear-catching ways. Besides, in SHIRT’s world, the New York Times prank wasn’t a cheap shot, but a high-minded homage to the poet Kenneth Goldsmith’s controversial ideas on the artistic use of repurposed information. Since then, he’s continued to promote his work with a performance artist’s mentality. In 2016, he eschewed the Internet altogether to premiere “Summer Not Coming” by driving an F-150 truck through New York City while blasting the song all day. More recently, SHIRT re-enacted conceptual artist David Hammons’ famed 1983 attempt to sell snowballs on a New York City block corner. Back on Twitter, he posted a photo that seems to get to the essence of how he sees himself as not merely an MC, but an artist with loftier, extramusical goals. In the photo, a faceless mannequin’s head wears a do-rag, with a single line of commentary: “Do-rag in the MOMA—it’s my time.”

Pure Beauty, SHIRT’s first album since signing with Jack White’s Third Man Records, shares that interest in elevating the experience of listening to him rap into something bigger. On the project’s jump-off single, “Flight Home,” SHIRT rhymes over bruising synth lines and viscerally thudding kick drums from Dutch EDM producer and DJ San Holo. He compares himself to the Lox rapper Sheek Louch on a quest to cop Picasso paintings, pivots to address a verse to “all the immigrants and refugees,” and ends his tirade with the declaration, “This rap shit still a sport to me/Kaepernick jersey on, that’s a hero of mine/Stand for something that you zero in on.” The song is accompanied by a video in which SHIRT raps atop a truck emblazoned with giant Nike and Adidas logos—painted on by hand, then left unblurred in the video, even though (as a press release proudly notes) the companies were not consulted on their use. The visual gambit falls uneasily between a critique of hip-hop’s relationship with corporate sportswear brands and, once again, a flimsy attempt to muster up attention. Pure Beauty plays out in a similar fashion, committing wholly to neither SHIRT’s appealing raw rap chops nor his grander concepts.

The songs that bookend the tracklist drive this point home. The album opens with “Snowbeach,” titled in reference to the sought-after Polo Ralph Lauren jacket made iconic by Raekwon in the Wu-Tang Clan’s “Can It All Be So Simple” video. SHIRT and his guest Chase chisel weighty lines into producer Ricky Dubs’ low-slung, bluesy beat, with the host threatening, “I could run up in this gallery with the mask on.” He has the same sort of street-smart, razor-sharp flow that Rae himself perfected on the fabled Purple Tape, and the song emerges as the album’s most concrete demonstration of SHIRT as a beast with bars who’s also self-aware enough to spit, “Most my music not streaming like I’m Prince!”

But then the 11-track album ends with “Mise En Abyme,” a near-eight-minute recording of the French artist Marie Matusz talking about the creative process. If you keep going, you’ll eventually find a scant two-part rap from SHIRT hidden two-thirds of the way through the song. But it’s a frustrating listen even once, despite the hypnotic, celestial beat from Steel Tipped Dove. For his closing lines, SHIRT raps, “Parties in pyramids, left my tag on the wall/Beats echo off the stone, I be repping for y’all.” It’s a solid point—sometimes there’s more value in leaving a legacy in the physical foundation than the artistic ether.